The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat) Read online

  Need broke her open, melted her, left her anything he wanted. She turned her cheek back into the door, shaking.

  “I kind of like it, that you don’t say it,” he whispered again, and his thumb came back and played lightly over her clitoris, like his breath on her wrist when he taught her to make the sweep of a Phénix’s wings out of golden ashes…back and forth, and back and forth, that breath, until the need for more of it had rendered her mindless. “It gives me more power,” he murmured, very, very softly, his breath against the sensitive spot behind her ear as light and warm as his thumb against that secret nub.

  She couldn’t speak now, even if she wanted to. He had stolen all her words. Everything in her pulled toward that need for his thumb to press harder. In just that rhythm. But something she could feel.

  “If you said please,” Patrick murmured, “I might not be able to refuse you. If you said, Please, Patrick, please, in that little voice gone all panting and helpless, I might not have the heart to tell you no.”

  She sank limp against the door, mindless. Do whatever you want. Because she wanted to learn and feel whatever he wanted to do to her even more than she wanted to come.

  “I see you see it my way,” that rough dark voice told the nape of her neck. “Oh, Sarah, you have no idea how sweet this is to me.” One heavy hand swept down her back until it pressed firmly on the very tail of her spine as that arched to him and his other hand rode her wet and clinging sex. “And dark and…sweet.” His thumb settled onto her clitoris like that breath coming home to rest, growing more solid, more tangible, becoming real and warm and alive as it circled, circled, circled toward home. “Chérie d’amour,” he whispered. “There you go, bébé. You can come.”

  She collapsed into the door, shaking, at his word and the press of his thumb, her body falling in the waves of release until he caught her and pulled her back against him, holding her up and warm against his body while the heat flooded hers and the waves of it kept fighting their way through her, until even her brain could not resist them anymore, until they had beaten her and she was limp and held tight in his arms, her face hidden in his chest.

  “You sweetheart,” he said, low and fierce, and picked her up, stepping over their dropped coats as he carried her to the bed. Her tights were tangled half down her thighs, her dress still on, and he was still completely clothed. “Let me take you, Sarah. Now. Let me take you just like this.”

  Whatever you want. Aren’t we doing whatever you want? Because that’s all I want to do. Over and over. But since he seemed to want her consent, she gave him that, just a low sound of acceptance.

  He laid her down on the bed, and his eyes glittered as they swept over her in her silk dress and boots and half-removed stockings. “Bébé, is there somewhere I can buy you another pair of these pretty stockings? Because I would really, really like to see you with them all ragged and torn just for me. Torn just so you can wrap your legs around me.”

  She couldn’t even think properly about where she had gotten her sparkly stockings. She made a soft sound of consent again. Because she wanted that, too.

  He started to shrug out of his tuxedo coat and stopped at something in her eyes. “Keep it on? You like this? Me all dressed up like a prince for you everywhere but…here.” He undid his pants.

  How black he looked in the night, and how wild and elegant both, with the black-on-black suit and the streetlights just glimmering here and there in his golden hair, transforming him from golden sunlight into a dark night creature dusted in starlight. Hunger came back, sudden and demanding, as if she hadn’t just been fed.

  “Sarah.” He gripped her thighs and pulled her into him, sudden, hard, demanding. “You are so hot.”

  Although she couldn’t figure out what she had done to be hot. She scrabbled under her pillow as he dragged her down to him and found that leftover packet and almost threw it at him.

  He snatched it from the air with a rough, angry laugh. “Sarabelle.” He leaned over her, leaned that touch of temper and all that darkness into her just a little, until she was entirely caged in him. “I will always take care of you.”

  Oh, God. She just flowered for him so helplessly. Everything he did and said. She wanted him desperately, and she wanted him desperate, and she wanted him just as hard and wild as he could possibly want to be.

  She found it hot that he could slip that condom on so fast and sure, hot the way his pants rubbed against her inner thighs as he pulled her to him, hot the way her body dragged against the bed at his command. When he ripped her tights wide open so that he could take her in her crushed silk and shattered sparkles, she nearly came again right there. She felt the pressure of it, the rising, inexorable demand of it, waiting for him to release it.

  He lifted her body up to him in both hands when he drove into her, and she cried out. At the cry, his eyes swept glittering over her face. “Oh, yes, you like this, don’t you?” he breathed. She closed her eyes against that glitter, against how much she liked it, turning her face into the bunched comforter as he let her upper body settle back onto the mattress. “You like me in you this deep, Sarabelle?” His darkest, roughest murmur.

  She didn’t answer out loud, but then she didn’t have to. Her body clutched around him, and he seemed to understand that language very well.

  “Are you going to like it when I take you this hard?”

  She threw her hands over her face. “I like everything you do,” she whispered helplessly. “You know that.”

  A firm hand took her wrists, both together, and pressed them to the mattress above her head. “Are you going to like it when I trap you just like this, so you can’t hide your face from me?”

  The need to come swamped her again, arching her up, tightening her all around him. Oh, God, her hands imprisoned, unable to get anything right, unable to do anything wrong. God.

  His hand tightened on her wrists, just hard enough that she knew exactly how impossible it would be to break free. “Sarabelle.” That rough, rough dark voice. “You and I are going to work together very well.”

  His other hand cupped under her bottom again, lifting her up tight. “All right, Sarah, give it up to me again. Because I can’t hold off anymore.”

  And while he took her, those slow, slow, deep, insistent strokes that would not let her do anything but brace for that second when he hit his deepest in her and clutch and weep when he drew back, she rippled around him, first an aftershock of her first time, and then – as his body grew harder and faster, as the darkness seemed to overtake all his sunlight and his eyes glittered on her face and swept glittering all over her body, watching it take his thrusts in its rent stockings and slippery silk – in the mounting insistence of another wave that crested so hard it almost hurt, and she cried out again, lost in darkness with him as he came.

  Chapter 18

  In the early hours before dawn, Patrick lay on his side, facing the window, his body warming her whole back, and Sarah kept drifting toward sleep, except that his hand would stir in a soft stroke of her belly, and that would wake her again a little, this alien presence that made no sense in her dreams.

  Strange instincts swirled in her when that happened, tangled with the almost-dream – the desire to curl into him and tell him she loved him, but of course she could not do that. They were not equals. She didn’t have the right to fall in love with him. This wasn’t in her hands.

  If they had worked down the hall from each other in some big engineering firm, the handsome man who managed to keep them all functioning as a team and the brainy, serious colleague determined to get everything right – and even succeeding – would she have had the confidence to tell him? Would she ever have been sure enough of herself for him, even with the solid strength of a successful and respected position behind her?

  She liked him taking over, to be honest, but it left her in a very strange place.

  Patrick slid his hand from her belly to her forearm and down it to one of her hands. He seemed completely incapable of slee
ping, even though it was nearly dawn again and he had to go into work. Her day off, not his. “Where’s the Asian from?” he asked quietly. His thumb touched the base of her index finger and traced slowly to its tip. Then shifted to her middle finger, repeating the gesture one finger by one. “You were born in America, right?”

  Her hand curled up suddenly and hid inside his, catching his hand by surprise for a second before it obligingly curved around hers to help it hide. “My mother immigrated from Korea. My older – sister was born there.” Her voice faltered, but – no, I can’t talk about that. “North Korea,” she added after a moment, though, because maybe, maybe – he might see. Without her needing to tell him.

  But he didn’t seem to peg to that. A lot of people, she had realized growing up, had no real idea of the difference between South Korea and North Korea. Some vague impressions of a nuclear threat and a mad leader were the most she could expect, even from the people who read the news.

  “I thought Lin was a Chinese name,” he said, and she blinked, surprised he knew that. She hadn’t even known it herself until a genealogy project in fourth grade.

  “It probably came from China at some point, generations back. I don’t really know.” Her mom didn’t like to talk about Korea or her family.

  Patrick made a soft sound to indicate he was listening, his fingers entirely fascinated with their stroking of her arm. “And after she got to America she had you? Did she marry an American?”

  “Eventually. Not my biological father, that didn’t work out, but I’m not sure if she ever really had any expectation that it would. I think she was grabbing on to anyone she could with him. I was the anchor child. You know – once I was born and a U.S. citizen, I could eventually sponsor them for U.S. citizenship, too.” Her mother had settled in for the long haul, to keep her head down until Sarah reached twenty-one so that she and Danji wouldn’t be deported, training her kids to keep their mouths shut, not to draw the wrong attention to their status. Fortunately, the marriage to Matt, Sarah’s stepfather, had eventually taken that burden off her seven-year-old shoulders. It hadn’t saved her three-year-old or four-year-old shoulders, though. She had always known that if she wasn’t careful, her mother and sister could be taken away, sent back into something terrible, but she could not. She would be sent into a foster home.

  She shifted her hand to curve over Patrick’s suddenly. What had his foster home been like? Luc seemed to respect his foster father, when the man came by their kitchens, but it had shocked her to learn that the same man was also Patrick’s foster father. Patrick treated him with a needling hostility that always bothered her, when she witnessed it; it wasn’t like Patrick to be mean.

  “So did your mother speak English well when you were a baby?” Patrick asked. “Was it easy to handle school, or did you have to learn English there?”

  “We did fine,” she said stiffly. Very well, even. Her mother hadn’t known how to read and write in Korean much beyond her own name and had struggled terribly with English. To this day her accent was so strong that very few store cashiers could understand her. But she had drilled herself and her girls with endless English language tapes, and taken them to all the library story times, and pushed them into any program she could find. So Sarah had never had much of an issue at school. Danji had struggled more: malnourished for the first five years of her life and with no exposure to English until she was in the U.S. and already, therefore, in kindergarten. Sarah had never known what malnourishment was. Their mother loved to cook. Once she arrived in the land of plenty, she stuffed her daughters as full as she could.

  “I’m sure you did fine, Sarah.” Patrick traced over her shoulder, exploring the muscles and bones of her upper back. It was a funny, precious feeling, his absorption in her body, there at dawn. “I was asking if it was hard to do fine.”

  “Oh, yes,” Sarah said, low, remembering. It felt so easy to talk to him here in the gray end of night, with her back to him, with his hand tracing over her as if it could not quite stop. “Well…I don’t know. Our mother was really anxious that we do well, so we were anxious, too. Even though we always did well, really.” Even Danji, stubborn and persistent, studying hard and utterly enamored of books.

  “So you’ve always been that way,” he said thoughtfully. His fingers found the strongest curve of her shoulder muscle and walked it slowly on down her arm. She wanted to go to sleep now and dream forever of this feeling of being so special, never to wake out of it again. “Not realizing how well you’re doing.”

  She blinked a moment, not sure what to make of that. How well she was doing at what? At making love? She was hardly doing anything. He was the one – her body flushed all through with the memory again, of the way he took her over, of the way she yielded – it was all him.

  His fingers finished their walk over her elbow, down to her hand, and out over it to the very tip of her middle finger, which he rubbed gently before his fingers drew back up her arm in a slow stroke en route to somewhere else.

  A great sigh moved through his body. She felt it gather in the shift of muscles so near her, then drift in a cascade of warm air over her back. “I’ve got to go.”

  That was probably better, really. She didn’t know what to do with him. She only knew what to let him do with her. She needed to have her own space back, because that was the only way she could control it as her own. Exhaustion settled heavily over her, holding her down with as much imperative as Patrick did. She might sleep half the day.

  Her eyes widened suddenly. “You haven’t slept at all.”

  “Mmm.” He trailed a finger down the nape of her neck, and she still shivered at it, a tired, contented shiver.

  “Patrick. How late are you working?”

  He yawned heavily, as if even thinking of it was contagious to his energy. “Until midnight or so, I assume. Unless I can get Luc to fire me, there’s always that.” He bent and pressed a kiss to her bare shoulder, pulled the comforter carefully over her, and slid out of bed. “I’ve got to get home and change.” He rubbed a hand over his jaw absently, the fresh growth just starting after yesterday’s shave…for her.

  How many times had she tortured herself with the thought that when he showed up in the hotel kitchens with that faint growth on his jaw, it was because he had just rolled out of bed from a hot date the night before? Tortured herself by wondering if some of his women preferred prickles. She hadn’t realized that even fresh-shaved at the start of the date, by the time they got home after midnight, he would have that little prickle to rub against her skin still, the finest-grained sandpaper compared to the rougher, more sudden prickle of that first night.

  He dressed so quickly, once he put his mind to it. Gathering all his energy for this day.

  God, he was going to have a shitty day. That brutal, physical, unrelenting, perfectionist work far into the night again, on no sleep. And after a long, intense day yesterday, with only the theater for a break.

  She rolled completely over suddenly and sat up, clutching the comforter to her nakedness. “Patrick.”

  He was already at the door, picking his coat up off the floor and hanging hers up at the same time, but he turned and came back to her.

  Her bed was a low one, and she looked a long way up at him, still so handsome today, even tired and tousled and unwashed. A wave of shyness washed over her. What could she possibly say to him? To call in sick? He couldn’t do that any more than he could let her do it the other morning. To be careful? They both knew exhausted people were ten times as likely to burn themselves, what good did it do to remind him? To rest? He couldn’t. There was nothing. He had to get through this day. She had a wild urge to come in herself to share it with him, give herself an equally horrible day for his sake, but God knew, her being ten times as clumsy and in need of assistance all day in those kitchens while he himself was exhausted would not be a help to him.

  She didn’t really know what to say, or to give him against this day, and so she reached out and took his hand, curved i
t to her face, and kissed it.

  Patrick drew in a sharp breath. And then he knelt between her legs, putting their faces on a level. His hands framed her face, his thumbs tracing over her eyebrows, grazing past her temples, then coming to stroke over her cheekbones, back and forth, softly. He kissed her, firm and long and warm. Drawing back, he took a breath as if to say something – and then caught it and gave his head a tiny shake. “You’re so pretty,” he said softly. Tu es si jolie. Then, rising from his knees with that lazy, animal grace of his, he was gone.

  Like a dream at first light.

  Chapter 19

  What a shitty day. Patrick got through it on adrenaline, as they always had to do, but by the end of it he had burned himself three times, and the last time he didn’t even notice right away. Noë, who was supposed to be under him, had to tell him. “Go put some Burn Ease on that thing before you get it in somebody’s food. You need to go home, Patrick.”

  “Can’t. Luc’s off mating.” Thank God. Maybe Patrick had managed to knock some sense into that man’s head after all. “Somebody’s got to be here.”

  “Somebody is,” Noë said very dryly. Patrick glanced at the other man, who was his age but still in his shadow, because Patrick hadn’t left yet, as a lot of seconds might do by the age of twenty-seven. Put on that MOF collar and head out full throttle in pursuit of that dream.

  Patrick offered a wry grin. “You would be too short-staffed if I left.”

  Noë turned away in acknowledgement, because it was true, and Patrick kept working for some time, on nothing but adrenaline, before he remembered the burn.

  He did let Noë handle the last of the service and cleanup, when orders started slowing. As soon as he peeled the chef’s jacket off him, the adrenaline came with it, fatigue slumping through him so hard he wanted to just curl up on the floor. If he could have trusted the others not to kick him back awake, he might have done it. Pillowing his head on his jacket sounded much easier than getting home.